______________________________________________

___________________________________

Starting in October, 2025 and for 100 weeks until September 2027, we’re going to highlight the “Top 100 Moments in the First 100 Years of Television.” 

___________________________________

Why 100 Years, you may ask? Let me tell you a story….

Sometime in the summer of 1921, 14-year-old Philo T. Farnsworth had an idea for an electronic television system. 

On September 7, 1927, he made that idea work. 

That makes September 7, 1927 the day that video arrived on this planet. 

From this website, we are counting down to the Centennial of what deserves to be recognized as a pivotal moment in human evolution. 

It Started With A Sketch

Here in the 21^st century, we stare at screens all day, never suspecting that every screen on the planet can trace its origins to a sketch that Farnsworth drew for his high school science teacher in 1922. 

What Farnsworth drew – first on a chalkboard, then on paper – illustrated his concept for one of the most challenging concepts of the era: a vacuum tube that could convert moving pictures into an electrical current and send it through the air. 

The same year that Farnsworth got his idea, Albert Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for the first of the four groundbreaking papers that he had published in 1905.  Einstein’s articulation of the Photoelectric Effect established one of the cornerstones of the quantum mechanics and the physics that led to nuclear energy in the middle of the 20^th century.

The sketch that Farnsworth drew for his science teacher was a pure application of Einstein’s theories bottled in a vacuum tube – and an epic breakthrough in what humans could do with the fundamental forces of nature.  

Farnsworth’s concept for an “Image Dissector” tube was the turning point in the ages old dream of “seeing from a distance,” and the one moment that made possible all the video technology we take entirely for granted today.

The Backstory

Some will argue that television – or, more broadly video –  did not spring fully born from any single discovery. There is some measure of truth to the assertion. 

There were earlier attempts to merge radio and cinema, to reconstitute a moving image into a steam of electrons that could be sent by air or wire to a distant destination.  But the earliest attempts – going back to the late 19^th century – quite literally married the mechanics of motion pictures to the chemistry of electronics.  It was clear from the outset that such contraptions would never produce the resolution necessary to transmit a coherent image. 

And there were, starting in the first decade of the 20^th century, suggestions that vacuum tubes could one day replace the mechanics.  In 1897, the German scientist Karl Braun introduced the Cathode Ray Tube – demonstrating that a beam of electrons could illuminate a phosphorescent surface in a vacuum tube. That a similar device might be adapted for the purposes of television was first proposed by the English scientist A.A. Campbell Swinton in 1908. During roughly the same period the Russian Boris Rosing actually tried to build such a system. 

But Braun’s cathode ray tube only solved one part of the equation: it could turn a beam of electrons into light.  

The hard part was always going to be finding the means to convert light into electricty.  That’s what Farnsworth figured out in 1921 and delivered in 1927. 

And here we are nearly 100 years later, reading these words on a screen. 

A screen that arguably would not exist were it not for the idea that Farnsworth sketched out in 1922 and delivered on his workbench in 1927. 

The Countdown to 2027

This website (and likely a book and hopefully a documentary to follow) will trace the evolution of video technology and its impact on civilization over the past century.    

Because of the way that television was drawn into the culture and the economy, much of that history has been swept aside – especially the compelling story of television’s earliest beginnings in the 1920s and 30s.  

Over the 100 weeks beginning October 5, 2025 and ending the week of September 7, 1927, we’re going to countdown in chronological order 

The Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Video.  

Every week over the next two years we will trace:

• The evolution of the technology that first appeared in Farnsworth’s San Francisco laboratory in 1927;
• The titanic struggles in the 1930s that finally delivered television to the world after World War II;
• The merger of video with digital computing in the 1950s;
• The changes in delivery technology from vacuum tubes and broadcasting to cable, streaming, WiFi and cell phones;

…and we will introduce you to the  countless colorful personalities who made their mark on the medium in the century since 1927. 

Join The Crusade!

Television / video is a global phenomenon, but this will be an admittedly very America-centric accounting of the medium’s history. There will be occasional nods to breakthroughs in other countries like Britain, Germany and Japan, bit the underlying reality is: Television was invented in America by an American.  

It will also be very “Farno-centric.” At its heart this project is intended to remind people who Philo T. Farnsworth was, and to restore to our collective memory the extraordinary, once-in-century individual who – as the poet Max Crosley put it – “breathed life into all our living room dreams.” 

So sign up for the email notifications or just come back when the moment suits you.  

You’re going to learn a lot of neat stuff over the next couple for years, and hopefully, at the end, there will be a world-wide celebration of the medium and the man who invented it. 

_________________________________________